In the absence of our organist and choir director, I am helping to lead music lately. Sometimes fellow parishioner Michael and I play guitars. Sometimes I use the dulcimer. Another parishioner, Adam, recorded a few of Sunday’s hymns on his iPhone.
During communion, Jesus, our mighty Lord (478, Hymnal 1982)
Post-communion hymn, Fairest Lord Jesus (383)
Recessional hymn, Lord, you give the great commission (528)
The Compañeros de Cristo (Companions of Christ) group in our diocese (Northern Indiana) is planning a trip to our companion diocese of Honduras in late January; I hope to go. (Postponed — possibly to summer.)
I have been playing guitar and singing for our parish’s Spanish-language mass since Easter 2013. I sometimes also serve as a lay reader. Many of the folks connected with this mass are from Honduras. My Spanish is perhaps at a second- or third-year level; I can understand a lot of what I read, my pronunciation is pretty good, conversation is challenging, and so is listening.
From now until mid-January, any proceeds from CD sales or other musical endeavors will go toward my travel costs.
I also have handmade jeans bags for sale. All are made from thrifted jeans, lined with other fabric scraps, with inner and outer pocket(s). If you’re not local, you can buy them on Ebay.
And here is the choir of St. Thomas Episcopal Church practicing the Sanctus and Agnus Dei I composed for Father John in honor of his retirement.
Sanctus
Sanctus again, the same take made faster without changing the pitch:
Agnus Dei
I borrowed a friend’s condenser mic to record our church choir’s practice tomorrow. This evening I experimented with it to figure out how to connect it to my mixer and thence to the computer.
Here’s “My shepherd will supply my need” — tried two different reverb effects on the same take.
And here is an original, “This is the day.”
My Christmas album, What Child Is This?, is now available at CDBaby as well as right here.
I just got back from FedEx / Kinko’s where I picked up the final proofs for the trio CD and shipped it all off to National Tape and Disc: CD-R master, CD of PhotoShop art files, proofs, intellectual property rights form (declaring we’re not using NTDC for bootlegging), and the first payment, all traveling together in a bubble mailer, nice and cozy.
It should arrive in Nashville in three days, and come back in another three and a half weeks.
Woo-hoo!
Yesterday I got the final approval from Jerry and Craig, with one revision to the booklet. I did that revision and took it to Kinko’s to order a new proof, and then went down to Wilburland to get some Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and show Matt our work. After listening to bits of two tracks, he said it sounds good, better than it ought to for a home recording. Gratifying to get approval from a real engineer.
I hadn’t listened to the CD since last Wednesday when I sent it off to the guys for their approval. Too much “in it,” I was afraid that if I kept listening to it I’d keep hearing things I would want to try to change.
When I got home and burned the tracks onto the new CD-R, though, I had to listen to it to make sure it burned properly. About half-way through I started getting nervous and thinking there might still be things I needed to fix. Even though I know that I’m a high-anxiety type and overly sensitive, it was hard not to take this nervousness seriously.
I listened again a few hours later, and decided it’s fine.
It’s fine!
Not perfect, but if we waited for perfection we’d never get anything done. Especially if, like me, your standard of perfection gets more and more absolute the more you work at something. I think imperfections, imprecisions, inaccuracies, and so on, are a given in this earthly life. It’s a fallen world, and we’re fallen people. It’s still important to work on narrowing margins of error, but I think they will always exist this side of heaven.
The trio CD continues to near completion… still.
We are done recording, and I’ve got decent mockups of the graphic design, so all that remains is finishing.
Thursday evening we got together to listen to the CD. We agreed that the panning and balance among instruments seemed fine, and the volume from one piece to another seemed consistent. But in general, the guitar is just a little too bassy or muddy on some tunes, and the fiddle just a little too sharp.
I had already experimented a little with the EQ plugin to do a bass cut on the guitar and a high cut on the fiddle. It’s hard, with little computer speakers, to tell how much difference it’s making. Apparently not enough yet.
Yesterday I revisited the first four tracks and tried again. It’s certainly a learning experience.
One very useful thing I discovered is that you can have the plugin open during playback, adjusting and instantly hearing the change, even turning it on and off to compare to the original.
I’ve also been experimenting with what to adjust, too. I started with presets for bass cut and high cut, and have been modifiying the gain and bandwidth knobs — I only have a vague idea of how they work, but by tweaking one or the other or both I seem to be able to get the sound I want — at least on the computer speakers. We’ll see what happens with the CD player.
A very surprising discovery was that on one piece where the guitar starts with fingerpicking, the guitar track has a lot of bleed from the fiddle and dulcimer — perhaps that mic’s gain had been boosted to get a strong enough signal compared to flatpicking. So I added the fiddle EQ adjustment to that track as well, and I also understand now why everything sounded balanced even though the guitar track’s meter runs higher than the other two.
Two other discoveries, not EQ-related:
1. “Spootiskerry” is not a traditional tune. It was written by the late Ian Burns, copyright 1980. Thanks to Susan Songer (of The Portland Collection), I was able to get in touch with his daughter to get permission to include the tune. Whew!
2. For medium runs (500-1000 CDs), it’s only pennies more expensive to have them professionally replicated (manufactured), versus professional duplication (CD-Rs; actually more expensive than replication for this many CDs), having imprinted blank CD-Rs made and the graphics professionally printed, or doing everything ourselves.
Replication costs more up front, and you have to commit to a pretty high number of CDs, but the quality and appearance is better, it’s less time and work on our part, they’ll be shrinkwrapped, and even if we only sell 100, we’ll at least break even.
So — we’ve decided to have the CDs done by the same company (National Tape and Disc) that pressed my two solo albums.
Last night The Hanshaw Trio recorded our guitarist Craig’s tune “Cherry on Top.”
This is the tune with a syncopated A part — a lot of the accents fall one eighth note before the downbeat, so that it’s easy to lose the feel for those downbeats, tempting to shift them ahead a bit and lose the syncopation. Fiddler Jerry and I both struggled with this, but in different places. Then the transition to the unsyncopated B part always throws me off a little, and it’s hard to get the expression and timing of my part just right. That and my hand hurt last night.
Still, it’s been a fruitful and rewarding experience to put a trio version of this tune together.
A few times at past sessions, while waiting for something to save, Craig would start playing the tune and Jerry would improvise some long sustained notes over it. I may have tried a few things myself, although I think I hummed them rather than trying to play them.
With some difficulties — because of that syncopation and because I’m not really a guitar player — I managed to transcribe something like the tune, and draft some preliminary fiddle and dulcimer parts.
We talked through some arrangement ideas, put them on paper, and played with them last night, adjusting and refining and adding as we went.
Guitar starts alone. Fiddle comes in with a long sustained note and a little run. At the B part, dulcimer replaces fiddle. Second time through, it’s everybody. Third time on the A part, the dulcimer part gets fuller, mixing melody and response parts. Then we cut to an alternative B part — at first it was going to be just guitar, but we added some dulcimer bass stuff — then a single strum, a pause, and back with a bang to the regular B part with everybody, closing with a slight fiddle slide into the final note.
It’s one thing to decide how to do something, and another to actually do it.
After trying a few times to run the whole thing, we decided to do three takes without that pesky fiddle run. Then on a new track, we worked on putting those runs back in with the right timing. I think I did something wrong on each take, but maybe with editing we can put something smooth together.
Later.
I have one more “gig” — playing the offertory in church this Sunday (“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with Camille on flute) — and one more recording session on Tuesday (Craig’s tune “Cherry on Top”), and then that’s it for this holiday season.
It’s been a nice full one this year, starting with the weekend craft show at Mom’s Place in mid-November. The busiest time was the weekend before last, when the trio had two gigs in Corning (about nine hours including travel and a dinner break) and then a gig near Albany the next day (about twelve hours for that one, yikes!).
Though I’m a little sad to be almost done with playing for a while, it’ll be good to have a break.
For one thing, we can get back to the trio CD. I’ve burned copies of what we’ve got so far for me and the guys to listen to and evaluate. I think I need to revisit some of the mixes — many seem to need more volume on the guitar and some need more dulcimer, too. I’ve also started thinking about possible track orderings, and I’ve been experimenting with traycard designs. At some point I’ll have to think about how to actually make the booklets and traycards — maybe buy software and paper myself, or maybe see about having them done at a local printer.
By the way, here’s a track list, in alphabetical order for now:
For another, it’ll give my hands a rest. I’ve been dealing with an inflamed tendon in my left hand since October or so — tuning and playing the dulcimer aggravate it a little. I’m not convinced the dulcimer caused the problem, but there might be ways I can adjust my methods to be easier on my hands.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the nail side of the tip of my thumb sometimes hurts while I’m playing; when I demonstrated the dulcimer for my physical therapist, she noticed that I tend to overarch the left thumb. I think this has to do with the finger-flick technique I use to compensate for being right-handed. By flicking the back of the hammer grip with my ring finger, I can get a clearer, stronger sound. Having a big arch in my thumb seems to help with that technique, perhaps by providing a nice shape for the hammer grip to rotate around, which seems to also help me keep the hammer from wobbling sideways. Perhaps there’s a way I can be more aware of that thumb — maybe I can keep it arched but not overarched, and keep it relaxed and not rigid.
Or perhaps I can train my left hand to do what my right hand is doing.
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!
We have recorded everything except one piece, an original tune called “Cherry on Top,” composed by our guitarist on the day his daughter was born.
It’s something he’s often noodled around on during down time; the more we heard it the more we liked it, and decided we should work up a trio version “sometime.” Now that everything else is done, “sometime” has arrived.
I’m not that great at improvising on something like this by ear, so my first task was to try to transcribe it.
I pieced something together by listening first to the bass notes, then to the highest pitches, then to whatever I could pick out in the middle. Sometimes I could catch the rhythm but not the notes, and sometimes vice versa. Most frustrating, there seemed to be odd moments where there was an extra beat or a missing one.
Nevertheless, with transcription in hand I wrote out some tentative dulcimer and fiddle parts and sent PDFs and MIDI files to the guys.
When we tried it last night, we figured out what was going on with those frustrating rhythmic oddities; many of the notes that I thought were falling on the downbeat actually occurred an eighth note before the downbeat.
Wow.
Even watching Craig tap his foot didn’t help me catch the right rhythm — once you’ve got an idea of a tune in your head, it’s hard to shift the feel of it by something so small as an eighth note (or a horseshoe nail).
Today, with the help of a new recording with a metronome, the freeware Audacity which lets one slow down a tune without changing its pitch, and a drumbeat ‘metronome’ to my NoteWorthy Composer file, I straightened out my transcription — and now I can feel the tune the right way, and those rhythmic anomalies have disappeared.
Woo-hoo!
Otherwise, last night’s session included recording additional tracks for Hills of Lorne and for Irksome Girl / Midnight Maze, after a late start — soon after we arrived one of Craig’s kids got hurt and it understandably took them a while to determine it was not a broken arm; good thing it’s not!
For Hills of Lorne, we added mandolin picking the melody, mandolin playing some long tremolo notes, fiddle playing a sustained harmony part, and recorder playing the same part. I wanted to play the part on the whistle instead, but I’m still new at the whistle so it didn’t sound as good, plus my whistle is a cheapie with the mouthpiece glued on, so it’s not tunable.
I’m not sure if we’ll use all four additional tracks or not. That will require a lot of listening to a lot of combinations.
For Irksome, I just added some dulcimer bass notes.
There’s plenty of work yet to be done: get some photos taken, do the graphic design (with the new old Photoshop, version 6.0, that I just won on Ebay), write the liner notes, and record Cherry on Top — but it feels good to be almost done with this CD.
Marcy Prochaska 